This might be too little, too late, but “NewsGuard Technologies, a new service that uses trained journalists to rate thousands of news and information sites, is launching its first product today: web extensions that let users view vetted, non-partisan trust ratings for news and information websites.”

Why it matters: It’s the first look at the services to be offered by NewsGuard, co-founded by journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. The labels, which have been researched and assigned by journalists, are being placed on the most trafficked news and information websites in the U.S.

How it works: Users can install the browser extension for the Microsoft Edge browser (here) and for Google Chrome (here), with one click. Websites will feature either red or green rating icons, which, when hovered over with a computer mouse, include NewsGuard’s “nutrition labels” (see here) with site ratings and summaries.

The labels will also be available on website articles within Facebook, Twitter or a Bing or Google search.

Crovitz says that by October, NewsGuard hopes to have completed ratings for the 2,000 sites responsible for 98% of the news and information shared on online in English in the U.S.

Brill says Spanish language sites will be added by the end of the year.

Every step in the right direction is good, but it seems to me that the problem is not identifying legitimate news sources, it is that Possum Hollar doesn’t want to believe anything that does not fit into their world view.

(The Left has some problems in this regard, too/also, but we do look at what they are looking at if for no other reason than to point and laugh at them. Imagine your Facebook Rage Uncle watching MSNBC. Ain’t gonna happen.)

4th Reich supporters are going to continue to believe agitprop Fox News no matter what, and not believe anything else, no matter how many red or green icons display.

Forget about “nutrition” values, labels and red or green icons, i suggest they measure and rate on how many steaming piles of shit a particular “news” source equals and then use the appropriate symbolism. For instance, we know that Tucker Carlson is full of shit, but he should be shown as literally covered in it too.

Using “Nutrition Labels” that have only positive (unbiased) terms and then mark them with green for good and red for bad strikes me as an ineffective way of describing biased websites. “Doesn’t repeatedly publish false content” is then marked with yes or no. Bad! Bad techies! Mark that sucker in red and call it “Repeatedly publisnes false content” or else these guys will just post screen captures in gray scale to prove what great news sites they are.